Outages and loss of connectivity in the Internet can have a significant impact on businesses and users. While the Internet was designed to recover from simple failures, there are numerous examples of accidents and attacks over the past two decades that have resulted in large-scale loss of connectivity. This suggests that standard mechanisms to ensure Internet robustness require renewed consideration.
Toward the goal of improving Internet robustness, this talk has two themes: (i) understanding the structural complexity and dynamics of the Internet—two factors which makes the Internet failure-prone and (ii) building scalable, robust and easy-to-deploy systems to enhance network robustness. I will describe a bottom-up approach to unraveling Internet complexity that is based on a unique repository of Internet maps. I will also describe a set of techniques and tools that take advantage of emerging technology to improve Internet robustness. Finally, I present a new research problem called “Internet Measurement Data Science” (IMDS), which will be the focus of my future investigations.